Dynamic sensor coalition formation to assist the distributed tracking of targets: application to wide-area surveillance

The protection of infrastructure and facilities within the UK is of prime importance in the current environment where terrorist threats are present. Surveillance of large areas within such facilities is a complex, manpower intensive and demanding task. To reduce the demands on manpower, new systems will need to be developed that use a mixed sensor suite associated with access to databases containing historical data and known threats. This requires fusion of mixed type data from disparate sources. The methods used for the fusion process, and the location of the fusion process, will be dependent on the data, sensor or database. The communication requirements will also be of paramount importance within the monitoring network. As computers increase in performance and reduce in cost and power consumption, there is a growing trend for more processing to be carried out locally. This raises issues of compatibility, timeliness, global awareness of the situation and distributed versus centralised control of the system. This paper presents a generic solution to the wide-area surveillance problem through the application and combination of covariance inflation (a distributed fusion mathematical framework that circumvents problems with data incest) with agent-based technologies (allowing the dynamic formation of sensor coalitions) to track, and potentially risk assess, targets within the region of interest. Simulations will be provided into the distributed detection and tracking of an intruding vehicle at a commercial airport.